I was just reading through some of my Twitter feeds and happened upon this Twitter feed from Tim O’Reilly, found of O’Reilly Media, where he links to an article that he had written about the current ‘recession’. In it he quotes an email that he fired off to O’Reilly employees a week or so ago.
Many of you have no doubt been alarmed by the developments of the last couple of weeks in financial markets, so I wanted to put a few thoughts out to all of you before disappearing on a combination of vacation and business travel for the next 3+ weeks.
…at the last company meeting, I talked about a theme that I’ve expanded on in public talks like the one I did at Ignite Boston and at Web 2.0 Expo in New York the week before last: the idea that robust strategies are ones you’d adopt in good times and in bad. And I argued that we probably end up with more robust strategies if we assume the worst rather than the best.
We could be in for a long, rough time in the economy. I’m not going to say otherwise.
But I also want to point out that rough times are often the best times for creativity, opportunity and change. We transformed ourselves from a technical writing consulting company into a book publishing company as a result of the huge economic downturn of the mid-80s. After the dotcom bust in 2001, we launched Safari Books Online, Missing Manuals, the Web 2.0 conferences, Foo Camp, Make: magazine, the O’Reilly School of Technology, and a host of other initiatives that have fueled our growth and that define the company today. We diversified and invested in new ideas.
This theme of coming up with new and better strategies in times of difficulty is one that I have heard quite a lot on the web and especially through Twitter. People see the months ahead (year?) as an opporutnity to take out the average players and for the quality organisations to really shine through. Tim O’Reilly also goes on to say,
And if you look at history, you see that this has always and everywhere
been true. It’s not an accident that economist Joseph Schumpeter talked
about the “creative destruction”
inherent in capitalism. Great problems are also great opportunities for
those who know how to solve them. And looking ahead, I can see great
opportunities.
Like all financial crises I am sure that this will be the case this time round.
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